Abstract

Several research teams have proposed controlled fragments of English suitable for building ontologies for the Semantic Web. These Controlled Languages are typically employed in applications that allow users to compose texts through guided authoring; the sentences in the text are parsed and interpreted to obtain axioms in OWL. We investigate here a variant of this approach in which the user enters sentences one at a time through an instant messaging interface, and receives an immediate response in English from the authoring system before typing in the next sentence. Such an application can support a variety of dialogue moves by the user—not only assertions, but also retractions, questions, requests for explanation, and so forth—and for each, we need to define an appropriate set of responses for the authoring system. To illustrate the interest and complexity of this task, we develop a formal model for just one case: responses to an assertion.

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